


Reconstruction without a Budget

by Oroburos69



Category: Pumpkin Scissors
Genre: Angst, Case Fic, Gen, Humour, Mission Fic, Original Male Dog - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-19
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-05 03:58:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1089359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oroburos69/pseuds/Oroburos69
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Government funds alone only go so far. The gaps get filled with mud, blood, and stupidity.</p><p>And luck. One mustn't forget luck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reconstruction without a Budget

**Author's Note:**

  * For [likeadeuce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeadeuce/gifts).



> Definitely no spoilers past volume 5 contained within.
> 
> I apologize. This got weird, fast. Merry Christmas?

They gave him stitches. The thread was black, the wound under it black-red, and the skin around it was angry red. Randel didn’t feel it today, just a buzz of nothing where pain should have been. They stole that when they gave him the nine.

They’re in the north, just him and Oreldo, because the war had taken the food, and people were starving. Winter hadn’t set in, but they didn't have stores for it, because their bombed-out fields hadn’t sprouted anything but weeds because the seed had been burnt.

Section III was hard to believe in, here.

Oreldo was cooking soup made out of water and half an onion. It smelled good, but it wasn’t going to make a dent in anyone's hunger. The air was thick with the scent of smoking meat, the herd of cattle Section III had been charged with delivering busily being converted into supplies for winter, but they wouldn't get any of it. The village hadn't suggested that they'd share, and Oreldo hadn't asked.

The sky was grey and smudged dark with snow, the end of autumn approaching fast. There were seven hundred people, twelve slaughtered cows, and not enough food for all of them to survive.

Before the war,  he’d eaten as much as any three men. The nine had taken his hunger, too. He felt the weakness, not the ache.

“Solemn, much?”

Randel startled, looking up from the stitches holding his arm together. “What?”

“You’re grim today.” Oreldo pointed the ladle at him, and then he smiled. “Missing the lieutenant?”

“She—no.” Randel shook his head. “I don’t—” He did, actually, but that wasn’t why. “It’s just sad here.”

Oreldo’s grin didn’t fade. “You can’t rely on her for your happiness, you know. She’s got a strong back, but we’re here to lighten her load, not add to it.”

“It’s not like that!” Indignation stole some of his grim mood, but Randel couldn’t help that any more than he could help the sadness that had overtaken him.

“Of course it isn’t.” Oreldo dipped the ladle back into the soup, and sampled it. “This is awful, by the way.”

“What?”

Oreldo’s smile returned. “The soup. It’s awful.”

“Of course it is. It’s just a boiled onion.”

“Well, we need the rest for getting back.” Oreldo’s mouth was nominally smiling, but Randel was starting to doubt the emotion behind it.

Randel felt his shoulders hunching in, and straightened up when he felt the scars on his back pull too tight. “It doesn’t feel like enough. The work we do,” he realized after he’d said it that he was changing the topic, but it felt like they were talking about the same thing.

“Should we have stayed in the capital?” Oreldo asked, handing Randel the ladle. “Kept the cows, because these people were just going to die anyway?”

“No, of course not!” Randel glanced around, his heart beating too fast, but Oreldo had chosen a moment when the villagers weren’t close enough to hear. “Are you trying to get us killed?”

“You think they don’t know?”

Randel knew they knew. He’d seen it in the way the parents didn’t let their children out of their sight, the way that no one—not even one—of the villagers had suggested keeping the cattle alive for the winter. They’d slaughtered them fresh off the train, at the fattest they could become, and immediately set to preserving them, breaking down and rendering the animals with smoke and salt.

“I think this will be one where some of them make it,” Oreldo said.

“That doesn’t make this okay. That doesn’t make what we’ve done _enough_ when we’re just going to head back to the capital while these people _starve_.” He touched the wound in his arm, and almost felt it. Static fluttered in his ears, the cold light of the will o’ the wisp shivering under his skin.

“Who gets helped, if we don’t survive to help them? What happens to all the people we haven’t yet gone to if we’re not there to go?” Oreldo’s smile couldn’t be real, not with him saying such things, but it didn’t go away.

“It’s unfair!”

“Yeah. But this country—there’s no damn food, Corporal. I know it feels like nothing, but we’ve done what we can, and these people are going to do the rest. And there’ll be no sons and daughters marching out to die, no levies, no rationing, no tribute, and maybe—if they’re lucky—maybe next year this town will get better.”

“It’s not enough.”

“Then wave the magic wand you’ve been keeping in your back pocket and fix it.” Oreldo glanced at Randel’s hand, and sighed. “That soup’s cold now, you know.”

He glanced down, surprised to find the ladle still firmly gripped in his hand, grey-coloured water still in it. Blue light was seeping from the edges of his coat. Randel handed the ladle to Oreldo and twisted the shutters on his lantern until they squealed from the strain.

“I’ll ask before we go, see if there’s anything else we can do.” Oreldo tugged the soup pot off the fire, and set it on the ground between them. It smelled good, but looked terrible. “Until then, cheer up!”

Randel looked away.

***

The mayor was a thirty-year-old woman. She spoke with them with her mother at her side, and her children in the room next door. She reminded Randel of the lieutenant, a little. Though honestly, a lot of things made him think of her.

“Three of the families on the west side have said they hear something moving in the night. There’s tracks in the fields, like a dog, but larger.” She stitched as she spoke, and didn’t look at them. Her mother never looked away.

“A wolf?” Oreldo suggested.

“Larger.” She was making a child’s shirt, piecing it together with quick, neat stitches. The fabric was newer than anything else in her home, and Randel remembered again that most of her village would die before spring came. “Kill it. If it looks edible, bring it here. We can use it.”

“Ah. Yes ma’am,” Oreldo agreed. His head tilted, his eyes watching her. “Anything else?”

The mayor looked up, and Randel revised his impression that she was less hostile than most.

Oreldo took a half-step back, his hand twitching against his side. “I see. West side being that way, then?”

She nodded, and returned to her stitching, her hatred hidden by the curtain of her hair.

“Right! Randel?”

He fell in step behind Oreldo, the scars on his back crawling, the fury directed at them so strong it was nearly physical.

They were halfway through the village, boots sucking into the mud from autumn rains, when Oreldo spoke again. “So that went better than expected, don’t you think?” He laughed, looking up at Randel, away from the blasted out village.

“How did you expect it to go?” Randel asked.

“Well. Worse than that. Usually someone tries to kill us. Though that grandma was definitely thinking of it.”

Oreldo cared, Randel reminded himself, pushing aside a wave of uneasiness. He was just making light of things. “They have the right to hate us.”

“Maybe the uniform, but neither of us ever did anything worth that hate.”

Randel flinched.

Oreldo didn’t notice. “So. West side?”

***

Randel was acting weird. It wasn’t a shock—Oreldo could count on one hand the amount of times the guy had acted normal—but it was different without Machs or the lieutenant. A lot creepier, for one, when everything he said fell into that dead silence.

“Looks a lot like the east side, doesn’t it?” There were four houses, but only three had roofs. A maple tree had covered the ground with deep red leaves, the dug-up remains of vegetable gardens the only place raked clean.

Randel didn’t respond, too busy looking utterly despondent.

Oreldo didn’t take it personally. “Sooooo. We should probably knock on one of the doors.”

“Yeah.” Randel's creepy lantern was glowing again. Oreldo hated it when it did that.

“So, I’m going to go knock on this door. This door over here.” Oreldo pointed at the closest house, and glanced up the mountain that was his partner for this mission. “How about you walk beside me?”

“Yeah.”

Creeeeeepy. Machs was going to freak when Oreldo told him about this.

Oreldo knocked.

The wooden door creaked and wobbled, iron hinges shrieking, and he heard people moving inside the house. The shutters shivered, and it was all kind of freaky. Randel made it worse, standing all stiff and dead-looking at his side. If the people inside decided to answer, they were going to be frightened of him, and then that would make Randel even more glum.

Oreldo hated slippery slopes like that. "Hello?" he called out, knocking again for good measure. "Heard you've got a wild dog problem?"

That made the people inside move again, Oreldo hearing a whisper of fabric and the sound of scuffing shoes. The door creaked open just wide enough for them to see a narrow slice of an old man's face. "You the military men?"

"For a certain value of military, yeah." Oreldo gave him his best smile, trying to make up for Randel's dead-eyed stare. "You got a giant feral dog?"

"It lives in by the crick to the west," the old guy said, shutting the door. Oreldo heard something being dragged in front of the door, and then a solid thump as the wooden boards that made up the door shook.

He saw the shutters on the other houses start to swing shut, and decided that they'd probably filled their quota for information gathering. "Well, you heard the man, Corporal! To the crick!" Oreldo turned on his heel and headed west again, out over the ragged fields and into the woods. The ground seemed to be falling in that direction, and it seemed reasonable that any flowing water that might be around would be at the bottom of a hill.

"Oreldo?" Randel had stopped, busy staring at the ground. He probably didn't know that his coat was glowing again, wispy bits of weird light twitching out around his button holes. Oreldo really missed having the lieutenant around, because Randel never did this kind of thing around her.

"Yeah?"

"Is this a track?" Randel was pointing at a puddle the size of a small cart, muddy brown water with red maple leaves floating in it. "I think it's a track."

"It's puddle," Oreldo said. He was proud of his patience. It was one of his many admirable qualities. Randel was starting to wear it thin. "Come _on_."

With one last wide-eyed glance at the puddle, Randel fell in step beside him. And above him, because Randel was tall enough that Oreldo always felt a little inadequate beside him. On the up side, he usually got to feel like an intellectual giant when standing next to the more literal giant in the unit, and that wasn't something Oreldo ever sniffed at. "It's a really big dog," Randel muttered.

"It's not gonna be bigger than a tank," Oreldo said, punching Randel's shoulder. Alright, he actually punched just above Randel's elbow, because it was more convenient, but the meaning was the same. Randel was his lackey on this mission, and he was _so_ fighting the giant dog thing. Oreldo was going to supervise like a superior office _should_ , no offense meant to the lieutentant. She had her style of command, and Oreldo was working on his own. So far, it was pretty hands off.

"It could be bigger than a tank."

"If it's bigger than a tank we'll feed it to the villagers. Problem solved!" It wasn't going to be bigger than a tank. That was crazy. Randel was crazy. He fought tanks head on—it had probably rattled something loose in his brain.

"If it's bigger than a tank, then I'm not qualified to handle it. You should take over and show me how to kill it."

"If it's bigger than a tank, I'll saddle it and make it my pony." If it was bigger than tank, Randel was still leading the charge. Oreldo's pistol only had three bullets, thanks to the gang of former soldiers they'd fought on the way up—and hell if Oreldo was going to punch the thing to death. "I'll call it Melvin."

"Hey!"

"Melvin Senior." Randel hadn't met the man yet, or he'd understand.

Randel gave him a suspicious look, like he suspected him of disrespecting the lieutenant—which Oreldo would _never_ , so screw off, Randel—then humphed and kept walking. The trees were wider apart now, the ground still torn up by boots and wheels from three years ago. Actually, a lot of them looked more recent, but that was normal. The war was over, but the soldiers hadn't disappeared. The mud was thick, sucking their boots deep with every step.

Except for the schlup of their boots and the squelch of their steps, the air was silent for about thirty steps. Then Randel broke it. "But what if it's huge?"

"You face down tanks with nothing but a jacked-up pistol. What are you worried about?"

"Dogs are a lot faster than tanks. And they have teeth. Big teeth." Randel held up his hands to illustrate the point, and Oreldo had to wonder what kind of dogs the guy had met that he thought the average dog had teeth as long as his hand. "And claws, but the teeth are a bigger problem than the claws."

"Are you scared of dogs?"

"I'm more of a cat person," Randel conspicuously didn't deny.

Oreldo laughed, then stopped because his voice rang out too sharply in the cool silence of the woods. Damn, Randel had him nervous now. "Are some of those scars from dog bites?"

"No, I got shot, and it covered it up, so. No. None of them are from a dog anymore." Randel was searching the trees like a rabid dog was going to burst out and attack him at any second. Nervousness in a guy who charged at tanks almost bare-handed—Oreldo was kind of wildly amused by that.

"Can't believe a dog would dare," Oreldo said. "What with you being all...you know. Enormous."

"I wasn't born this size," Randel said, like he was pointing out the obvious.

Sure he wasn't. Randel was probably grown in a lab or something. Only explanation. "It's not going to be bigger than a tank."

"Why do you keep saying that like it's reassuring? A dog the size of a tank would be awful!"

"You aren't scared of Mercury!"

"What's that supposed to prove?" Randel snapped. "That a normal sized dog isn't scary? Because that's _obvious_!"

Oreldo was ready to volley back with something terribly witty when he was interrupted by the sound of an avalanche. Or maybe not an avalanche, but something just as low, and so deep that it shook the ground beneath his mud-soaked boots. The sound echoed sharply through the leafless trees, the fallen carpet of red and gold stirring strangely.

"That was a bark. It was a giant dog barking." Randel's coat was glowing from the inside again, a bright twinkly blue that was ominous as all hell when you got right down to it. "A gaint dog that's going to eat us both alive because it's the size of a small mountain!"

"Calm down!" Oreldo ordered Randel and himself. "It was just a...uh...an avalanche." It really wasn't. Avalanches sounded a lot less like _'Arf!'_

"We could just turn back and say we didn't find anything," Randel suggested. He then shook his head violently, a tremor sliding through his limbs until they all went still. "No, no. We need to help the town. Pumpkin Scissors. War Reconstruction. It's our job. We got to do this."

"I would have been willing to go along with the first plan," Oreldo muttered, unholstering his pistol and wishing he had a lot more bullets than he did. "Damnit."

"Probably the geography of the area making echoes. Like shouting off a cliff or something." Randel had managed to erase all of his nerves in one fell swoop, and Oreldo was painfully jealous. "Come on."

As the superior officer, Oreldo should have led the way. As the smaller, and more likely to die if suddenly attacked by a dog the size of a mountain, he let Corporal Oland lead the way.

"Do you hear anything?"

The slope of the ground was getting steeper, and Oreldo could hear the sound of running water in front of them. It wasn't the heavy panting of a rabid monster dog, so he mostly ignored it. "Nope."

"I think I hear it." Randel had his giant monster gun out. Oreldo sincerely hoped his tank-aiming skills extended to dogs. Actually, Oreldo was pinning a lot of hopes on that.

"I don't hear anything."

"That's because you're talking. If you'd stop, you could hear it." Randel really needed to respect his superiors more.

Oreldo held his breath, listening as hard as he could. Mud squelching, leaves crackling, twigs breaking under their boots...well they weren't going to sneak up on it, that was for sure. "I don't hear anything."

Randel tilted his head. "It's coming toward us."

"Oh _hell_." Why was this happening in the middle of a forest? There wasn't any cover in a forest! The dog could come from anywhere!

Anywhere including directly in front of them. Oreldo blinked, the forest in front of him resolving into something else entirely. "Those aren't trees."

Randel didn't say anything, as stock-still as Oreldo was.

The things Oreldo had thought were trees were legs. Big, thick, legs, covered in shaggy red-brown fur. They ended in paws. Really, really big paws.

"We should go," Randel whispered after a second.

The dog took a hesitant step toward them, its head lowering through the branches until it could see them clearly. It was a lot bigger than a tank. Not as big as a mountain.

"Yeah." Oreldo took a careful step back.

The dog took a step forward, ears pricking up.

"Unless you still want to saddle it and make it your pony."

"This is _not the time_ , Randel." It was important to be firm with subordinates. Oreldo was sure of it. "Can't you shoot it?"

"I'd have to get a lot closer. I don't even know if this gun aims straight." Randel seemed less steady than he'd been. He was also oozing blue light like he had glow in the dark dry ice under his coat, and he didn't seem to have noticed.

"What kind of gun doesn't shoot straight?"

"The kind where the usual target is less than two feet away."

Okay. They needed a plan. "You run toward it. I'll run back to the village to try and get help."

"It'll eat me!"

"You've been shot by tanks and survived—it's just a dog! You'll be fine." Probably. Randel was really durable.

"You're better at dodging. You should distract it while I go get help."

The dog barked, and Oreldo's ears rang. It bounced forward, mud splattering through the air in bright, glittering arcs. Oreldo fumbled with his gun, training not forgotten, but suddenly a lot harder to remember. Then the dog was gone. Boom. Giant monster dog, then no giant monster dog. It was like magic, but good magic. Magic that took away the terrifying.

"Holy—"

A dog barked.

"Shit," Randel said, finishing Oreldo's sentence for him.

Oreldo looked down, away from the broken branches and splattered mud, and more toward ground level. A larger than average dog stood in the massive paw print from the giant monster dog. Around its neck was a bright blue collar.

"Did that dog just shrink?"

"Either that or it teleported," Oreldo said. He wasn't sure which he believed. "It...looks like the same dog?"

"Might be." Randel took a cautious step toward it, and then another when it didn't suddenly become giant again. On the upside, Randel had completely stopped leaking blue light.

The dog wagged its mud-coated tail, practically wiggling with joy, but Oreldo couldn't quite bring himself to trust it. "Can you read the collar?"

Randel knelt in the mud beside the beast, and carefully reached for the collar. "His name is Clifford."

"Okay. Does it say why he was giant?"

Randel leaned forward, and got a lick to the face for his trouble. "He's from Section 901."

"A...tank dog?" Oreldo asked. Randel didn't seem to be snapping his fingers and declaring ' _aha'_ , so Oreldo had his doubts, but that was Oland's old unit number, wasn't it?

 "I don't remember any dogs."

"We should take him with us." Clifford had a friendly face, and Oreldo liked dogs. What was the worst that could happen?

"What if he becomes giant and tries to eat us again?"

"It seems unlikely." Though the reverse was also unlikely, and had already happened. Oreldo thought it over. "Well, if he does, we should definitely get him away from town. He could step on people, or eat them. That would be terrible."

Randel still seemed unconvinced, so Oreldo decided to pull out the big guns. "Poor Cliff. He's probably been lost and alone since the war ended."

"You're right, we should take him with us."

**Author's Note:**

> I wound up reading Pumpkin Scissors for this fest and really quite liking it. So thanks!
> 
> Also, tank dogs were a thing. A very sad thing. Don't look them up.


End file.
